At first glance, Brentwood, Long Island looks like many a suburban American community. Strip malls lead to parks, which lead to gyms, and so on. Then, in the middle of a parking lot attached to a high school, a small wooden building in the shape of an octagon sits, surrounded by new construction.
That building is the schoolhouse of the town Modern Times, a free-love society founded in the mid-1800s. Ellen Edelstein, president of the Brentwood Historical Society, is currently overseeing its transformation into a museum about the historic community that operated with experimental rules.
“There was no formal government, no judges, no police, no, none of that stuff,” she said. “There was a time store, which was a place where you could go to barter your services for your needs… Women could vote. Women had an equal say in everything.”
According to Edelstein, one of the founders of Modern Times, inventor and industrialist Josiah Warren, started the community after living in a similar town in Ohio that failed after two years. He came to New York City, where he met lawyer and abolitionist Steven Pearl Andrews. The two established Modern Times in 1851; reports show affordable housing prices and low crime. But after 15 years, Modern Times came to an end.
“The concept fell apart with the onset of the Civil War, the economic struggles, and the bad press that it was getting in terms of free love,” Edelstein said. “So the concept of Modern Times fell apart, but the hamlet remained, and was renamed Brentwood.”
More than 150 years after its founding, some residents think parts of the culture around Modern Times remain, and it shows in other ways Brentwood stands out: about 75% of Brentwood residents identify as Hispanic, differing largely from neighboring towns in Suffolk County that are mostly white. The hamlet is also a blue dot on the county's mostly red voting map, in a district where the U.S. House of Representatives has gone to a Republican for the last 12 years.
“This place was an original draw to a group of people who were outside of the box, and that it always has been sort of a center point for that kind of energy,” said Joseph Pupello, a New York resident who grew up in the area.
“I think there was this thing that happened here for such a short time that triggered this to be a destination point for curious people, like the Puerto Ricans that came here originally, [who] were looking for new places. It was like a perfect match. There's something going on here that is just different than anywhere else.”
Outside of a few miles’ radius, Brentwood isn’t known for Modern Times. It has a reputation on the island for crime, often related to violence associated with the international criminal gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. But Pupello said he thinks the reputation is beyond unfair: it’s discriminatory.
“[People think,] It's that place with all the crime because that's the place with all the people that aren't all white, period. And it's always been like that, whatever our crime rates were throughout… history. It was never about the statistics. It was about what people thought of us in Brentwood,” Pupello said. “It’s 100% racial. Totally discriminatory.”
“It's not fair. I feel safe,” said Salomon Benavides, a mechanic in town who has lived here for almost 20 years. Sitting in his work truck, he tapped on the roof. “This car is my car to move my tools for work. Every day, I park it outside of the house and the street. I never lock the door. I never lose anything, nothing.”
Originally from El Salvador, Benavides is part of a community that arrived on Long Island after leaving El Salvador during a civil war in the 1980s and 90s. According to Joshua Ruff, a director for collections and programming at the Long Island Museum, they joined the existing Puerto Rican community in Brentwood. They were largely the first of many Spanish-speaking immigrants to settle in the hamlet.
“The origins of Brentwood as a Puerto Rican community go back to 1947 when a Spanish language newspaper in New York was basically advertising out to readers about lots For $150,” he said. As time went on, more Spanish speakers gravitated to the community.
“It was a comfortable place because you had businesses that were able to communicate in the Spanish language. You had a welcoming environment of local people who had lived there for ten to 20 to 30 years,” Ruff said.
In turn, the diverse population that continues to live in the hamlet influences how the hamlet votes, which results in the small blue dot on Suffolk County’s voting map.
Though that voting tendency can’t be traced directly back to Modern Times in a historical sense, Ruff said he thinks a town’s history can do more than just serve as a story.
“People are not always aware of the echoes of history. They're not always aware of how, in fact, a tendency of a place in terms of its openness, in terms of its immigrant past, how that might relate to the present,” he said.
“There's just a tendency to sort of see things in a presentist way that skips the connections and the culture that history establishes for us.”
Voting for the general election in New York begins at 6 a.m., and polls close at 9 p.m. Voting information and election updates can be found here.
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